A Close-Up Look At People Who Matter : Center Helped Woman Break Vicious Cycle

Other children might dream of being a cowboy or a firefighter, a nurse or a doctor.

Michelle McKinney dreamed of being a person.

“I was never a child and never a teen-ager,” said McKinney, 28, of Woodland Hills, who was molested by her father as a baby and physically abused by other family members. The anger and pain, the lack of a typical innocent childhood drove her to sell and use drugs when she was not yet in her teens, she said.

“My ‘family’ was a gang, and my home was the streets of Los Angeles,” said McKinney of her violent upbringing in Compton and Inglewood. At 13, she was arrested when she and members of her gang broke into a liquor store.

Getting arrested turned out to be a lucky break for McKinney, called “Mickey” by her friends.

“I would have died on the streets,” she said. “I think I wanted to die, but I was too chicken to kill myself.”

A worker from Penny Lane, a treatment facility for troubled children in North Hills, visited McKinney in juvenile hall and saw that her jaw was wired shut as a result of a recent beating by her father.

“Who did this to you?” the worker asked.

“That was something that no one had said to me before,” McKinney said.

Penny Lane, the National Foundation for the Treatment of the Emotionally Handicapped, was founded 25 years ago to help children like McKinney, angry and violent from lives of physical or sexual abuse.

It took five years for McKinney to work through her anger. Although she could sometimes go weeks without bouts of violence, she sometimes had to be sent back to juvenile hall.

She was able to make it, she said, because of the consistent love and even tone of people like Ivelise Markowitz, Penny Lane’s founder and executive director.

McKinney calls Markowitz the closest thing she has to a real mother.

Markowitz disciplined McKinney, “through clenched teeth and tight fist,” but she also earned the girl’s respect.

McKinney graduated from Penny Lane 10 years ago and eventually entered college with plans to become a lawyer, but returned to Penny Lane a couple of years ago--just to apologize.

There was nothing to apologize for, she was told. It amazed her to learn all the positive things Penny Lane workers said they had seen in her. She started volunteering.

“The next thing I knew, I was working there,” McKinney said. “It was like an old pair of shoes that fit comfortably.”

Now, as a co-counselor at Penny Lane, McKinney can share her experiences with the facility’s more than 100 residents. McKinney is quick to set straight the clients who tell her, “You don’t know. You’re just here to get a check.” She is there to help them, she says, because she’s felt some of the same pain.

“Somewhere along the line, it became more important than being rich,” said McKinney, who has dropped her law plans in favor of counseling.

After earning her bachelor’s in psychology from UC Santa Barbara in May, McKinney wants to attend graduate school. She plans to start her own treatment center someday, and hopes to help other African Americans caught in the same bureaucratic system she was.

Last week, Penny Lane celebrated its 25th anniversary with a dinner at the Universal Sheraton Hotel.

McKinney spoke on behalf of many of the residents of Penny Lane as she addressed a room full of board members, supporters and celebrities.

“I want to thank all of you, because it was you who gave us love and, better yet--life,” said McKinney. Her words received a standing ovation.

On her way home to her two children, son DaMeaun, 9, and daughter Tatiana, 7, McKinney said she realized she had finally achieved her childhood wish--to be a person.

“This is the woman I’ve dreamt about my entire life,” McKinney said.

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